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These iPad Screens Reveal Something About the Human Condition

Bob's iPad. 9-21-2012

My iPad. 8-8-2013

My iPad. 10-19-2012

My iPad. 9-17-2012

Bob's iPad. 11-19-2012

My iPad. 6-17-2013

My iPad. 10-10-2012

My iPad. 7-24-2013

My iPad. 11-16-2012

There are certain objects we look at constantly but never acknowledge. We stare at computer screens and chalkboards for hours on end, for example, but it’s the information they convey that draws our attention, not the objects themselves.

Photographer Meggan Gould flips this equation with Surface Tension. Gould has long used her camera to highlight the seemingly invisible things around us, and her newest work examines one of the most prolific, and overlooked, objects of our times: Touchscreens.

“I feel like there are a lot of very standard ways of looking at the world and I have this desire to make us stop and look a little harder,” says Gould, an assistant professor of photography at the University of New Mexico. “I want people to look at what we aren’t looking at.”

The photographs featured in the touchscreen series thus far are from the two iPads she, her husband and their four-year-old daughter use at home. The devices are in constant use, so she’ll wait until one is completely streaked before plopping it on a scanner to make a picture. She won’t reveal exactly what she does after making the scan, but will say she uses Photoshop to isolate all the marks left behind.

She’s serious about letting the iPad screens gather finger marks naturally. People have suggested she play Angry Birds for an hour, then scan the screen, but that feels too manufactured. She isn’t trying to find repeatable patterns, or make it a Rorschach test, but instead wants viewers to acknowledge just how much we interact with but never consider touchscreens.

As a professor, Gould says, she’s constantly asking students to think about the power of photography and the medium’s ability to translate the world differently. Instead of just talking the talk, she says she hopes this also project walks the walk by showing how a photo can help us take off a blindfold or see the world anew.

“I’m nagging them all the time so I’m also trying to find out what limits are of photography, what the limits are of visualization,” Gould says.

And even though Gould’s work isolates the movements people use to interact with an iPad, Gould says she’s not paying attention to new developments like a swipe up revealing the Control Center on iOS7. She’s not interested in interface analysis. She wants to think about how she interacts with these surfaces and hopes other people might also take a second look as well.

“I guess I’m hoping that projects like this make people look at the world around then just a little bit closer,” she says.